“Man and the intention of his soul”

“Man and the intention of his soul” is Clutton’s principle for portraiture: a painter should render both the person who stands before him and the inward purpose or emotional life that gives the visible figure meaning. The maxim enters Philip Carey’s artistic world through an argument about the limits of Impressionism. It becomes less a settled doctrine than a demanding question, sharpened by the difference between technical accuracy and expressive truth: how can a portrait disclose a soul without ceasing to be a painting of what is seen?

The principle and its origin

Clutton’s formulation surfaces after Philip and Lawson have been discussing Lawson’s portrait. Clutton dismisses it as unimportant, then explains that a painter has two principal subjects: the human being and the intention of that person’s soul. The idea had first reached him through Cronshaw. He had not initially taken it in; later, it returned to him with the force of a revelation. Its delayed arrival matters: this is not presented as a theory Clutton developed systematically, but as a thought that has gathered significance after remaining in his memory.

The maxim distinguishes painting a person’s appearance from conveying what that person inwardly means. Clutton grants the Impressionists their ability to paint people, but argues that they have neglected the second task. His contrast is with portrait painters who, in his view, could reproduce a sitter’s visible presence without communicating the animating intention behind it. The principle thus asks for more than likeness, but does not specify a simple technique for achieving more.

The dispute over what a portrait can show

Lawson objects that trying to represent a soul’s intention makes painting literary. He would rather paint the person as Manet did and leave inward meaning aside. Clutton answers that Lawson cannot equal Manet on Manet’s own ground, and that repeating an already exhausted approach offers no way forward. He turns instead to El Greco, whose work led him to believe portraiture could reach beyond what earlier painters had understood.

Clutton insists that this return to older art is not a return to Ruskin’s moral instruction. What matters to him is passion and emotion, not ethical teaching. He names Rembrandt and El Greco as painters who joined the visible person to the intention of the soul, while lesser portraiture, in his account, captures only the person. His comparison of a lily’s beauty with its perfume makes the distinction concrete: formal correctness may be present, but expressive force gives the work something further. He argues that a sitter’s character should be legible in the drawing and modelling, not merely supplied by a correct outline.

The exchange exposes a central difficulty in Clutton’s position. He demands that painting reveal what lies behind appearance, yet Lawson’s question remains: how is that inward intention to be found except by painting exactly what the artist sees? The principle offers a goal rather than a reliable procedure. It names the gap between seeing and understanding, but does not eliminate it.

Philip’s changing artistic standards

Philip initially enters the Paris art world amid lively arguments about competing schools. At Gravier’s, the debate sets older academic authorities such as Raphael against Manet, Monet, and Degas; admiration for the newer painters is treated as a mark of discernment. Philip takes up these opinions with increasing confidence. He comes to admire the Impressionists, places photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia above his washing-stand, and revises his judgments of the old masters. His enthusiasm is not simply a settled critical position: it is also part of his effort to inhabit the identity of an art student.

When Hayward visits, Philip passes on the opinions he has recently adopted, taking him to see Olympia and urging him to look at Vermeer. This scene shows Philip not merely receiving ideas but performing his new expertise for a friend he admires. Clutton’s challenge to Lawson’s portrait consequently meets Philip at a moment when his artistic convictions are still forming, and when confident allegiance to a movement may be easier than answering what painting itself can accomplish.

Fanny Price’s guidance offers another model of artistic judgment. In the gallery, she tells Philip that feeling the beauty of Rembrandt’s Disciples at Emmaus is necessary to knowing something about painting. Her seriousness is intense, but her insistence on directing his attention also contrasts with the difficulty of forming independent judgment. Later, Philip’s changing taste and experience leave room for a more complex encounter with El Greco, the painter Clutton invokes in theory.

El Greco and the problem of interpretation

A later encounter with photographs of El Greco’s work gives Philip a concrete occasion to consider the kind of expressive truth Clutton had described. Athelny shows him images of Toledo and other paintings. Philip is first unsettled by their departures from naturalistic proportion: elongated figures, small heads, and extravagant poses. Yet the pictures also convey a troubling reality. Their effect cannot be reduced either to accurate imitation or to arbitrary distortion.

Among the works Philip sees are portraits whose melancholy eyes seem to imply an unspoken meaning, religious figures with gestures he cannot readily interpret, and scenes of religious drama. The paintings move him before he can say what they mean. Athelny connects El Greco’s art with the night sky over Toledo, but Philip’s response remains one of puzzlement and feeling rather than a clear explanation. That uncertainty closely matches the maxim’s central problem: expressive force may be perceived before it can be translated into words, and the viewer’s response does not amount to certain knowledge of the painter’s intention.

Limits, failure, and significance

The principle also bears on Philip’s doubts about his own work. In painting Miguel Ajuria, he is drawn to the idea of capturing the intention of the soul, yet finds the task almost impossible to judge. Miguel’s forceful appearance does not guarantee a correspondingly substantial inner life; Philip finds the manuscript Miguel reads to him disappointing and worries that the apparent depth suggested by his face may not be there. Philip repeatedly scrapes out his portrait, unsure whether he has revealed anything or wasted his effort. The sitter seems to resist any simple equation between outward appearance and inward purpose.

Fanny’s conviction that she has artistic talent makes Philip’s uncertainty sharper. Her will is formidable, but he cannot treat determination as proof of ability. That doubt finds a severe answer when Foinet tells him that he has manual dexterity, industry, and intelligence, but no talent, and is likely to remain mediocre despite hard work. Foinet’s verdict does not settle the philosophical question of portraiture, but it gives Philip a practical reason to doubt whether his own striving can achieve the kind of expressive distinction the maxim demands.

“Man and the intention of his soul” therefore remains suspended between aspiration and difficulty. It resists the idea that a portrait’s success can be measured by resemblance or correctness alone, while refusing to make inward meaning merely a matter of explanation. For Philip, Clutton’s formulation becomes part of a larger uncertainty about art: what a painter can see, what a painting can communicate, and how anyone can know whether an image has reached beyond its surface.